- Unraid is switching to annual subscription pricing, offering Starter, Unleashed, and Lifetime licenses with optional extension fees for updates.
- Existing Basic, Plus, and Pro licenses can be upgraded to higher levels of perpetual licenses.
- This change may increase revenue for Lime Technology but could also make other NAS providers more appealing to users.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/YCFoR
Not a terrible monetization strategy but I personally don’t want proprietary software
I’m sure there are reasons for using Unraid but the original funky raid alternative they marketed has always struck me as extremely fishy. The kind of solution developed by folks who didn’t know enough about the best practices in storage and decided to roll their own. I guess people like web interfaces too. Personally I’d never use it. Get Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS, learn some Docker, Ansible and Prometheus, deploy and never touch until you break it or the hardware breaks. Throw Webmin on it if you like dancing bears too.
The draw to me was always that you could do a RAID without needing every disk to be the same size. Parity drives just had to be the size of the largest disk in the array.
I had been thinking about buying a license previously, when it was still “lifetime.” Now I’m skeptical and probably won’t although good for the people who got grandfathered in to free updates, though. However, I would question how long that lasts before they’re un-grandfathered-in and have to start paying for updates like everyone else.
“Now announcing UnRAID 2, UnRAID original will no longer receive updates as we focus our resources on UnRAID 2.”
And “UnRAID 2” will only have a subscription model, and people will the OG lifetime license won’t be grandfathered into the new license.
Like Adobe and Photoshop.
I’d say it’ll happen before 2030.
But I may just be cynical at this point.
Unraid can use randomly sized disks, and allows expansion of an array by adding more disks. Something that traditional RAID doesn’t do.
It’s more like Synology but on your own hardware, much more user friendly for people that don’t have the experience (or time) to set it up the hard way.
MergerFS
Not sure how traditional-traditional (hw RAID?) you’re referring to but you can use different disk sizes as well as grow LVM/mdraid or ZFS. It does indeed require a bit more thought and reading to do well. On the upside it’s probably much safer (for data integrity) and more performant.
As I remember ZFS did recently just add the ability to grow an array, but it’s not seamless and wastes space because of some limitations with it. You also need to learn the CLI procedures to do it without breaking something, vs just clicking a button on a webUI.
ZFS also recently had a major data loss bug so I’m not sure safer is accurate.
I do use ZFS on my servers, I’m not actually an unraid user myself. But managing ZFS is not easy and takes a lot of time to learn.
Not everyone interested in self-hosting stuff has the time or is even interested in diving much deeper into it than necessary. That‘s why QNAP and Synology also offer value to homelabers.
Coming from Synology, where I had learned much about docker and CLI, Unraid was the perfect next step for me to get rid of my Sonology‘s shortcomings. And I figure, it won‘t need anything beyond that in the future for me. I‘ve been successfully running quite a lot of services for the whole family being supported by a sufficient GUI and very limited need for CLI.
How does UnRAID Compare to TrueNAS Core (which is free, and backed by what seems to be a much bigger/more commercial organization)?
I used UnRAID years ago, but didn’t like booting from a USB drive - it was problematic and made me nervous.
It’s much simpler/easier to use, and supports expanding storage by adding more drives. More like your typical user friendly NAS like Synology.
TrueNAS can give you almost the same end result (minus being able to expand storage easily), but just takes a lot more experience and knowledge to pull it off.
Unraid uses a very simplistic scheme where you throw together a bunch of drives and one parity drive. The parity drive needs to be as big as the largest normal drive and holds recovery checksums for all the other.
Basically you can lose any one disk and still be able to recover the data, and the disks don’t have to be the same size.
You can achieve the same with snapraid + mergerfs if you want.
TrueNAS uses distributed parity schemes so it has same size requirements, but it also protects against bitrot and has other extra features.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LTS Long Term Support software version LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
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By the way, you can still buy the old licenses, which will be grandfathered in, and they will keep the old license upgrade paths too (Basic -> Plus -> Pro), so now may be a good time to grab a Basic license if you think you might want a lifetime Basic, Plus or Pro license in the future.
Thanks for this clarification! That is slightly more palatable.
Also posted it because unraid is not moving solely to annual subscriptions as your title and others have indicated. Previous pro and other fully included lifetime subs are just increasing in price and a lower tier is coming in to place.
